NBR Awards Killers Best Picture

Killers of the Flower Moon with
Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio
was named Best Picture by the NYFCCC and the NBR.

Killers of the Flower Moon continues to slay the competition, winning its second Best Picture Award from a major pre-Oscar group. The historical film based on the murder of Osage Native Americans for their oil rights was the top pick of the National Board of Review after winning the same accolade from the New York Film Critics Circle last week. In addition, Killers won for Best Actress (Lily Gladstone, also a NYFCC winner) and Best Director (Martin Scorsese). Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto won for his work on the film as well as for Barbie which was also named one of the year's top films. 

NYFCC Awards Flower Moon Best Picture; Etc.

Lily Gladstone won Best Actress from the NYFCC
for Killers of the Flower Moon.

Let the film award season begin. The New York Film Critics Circle is the first out of the gate with their picks for the best of 2023. Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese's three-hour-plus epic of the murders of Osage Native Americans by greedy white folks for their oil, was named Best Picture and Best Actress (Lily Gladstone as Mollie Kyle). But Best Director went to Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer which also won Best Cinematography. 

Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon

JaNae Collins, Lily Gladstone, Cara Jade Myers
 and Jillian Dion in
Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
(Apple Original Films)

Killers of the Flower Moon is Martin Scorsese's latest complex, massive epic, hypnotic and absorbing despite its three and a half hour running time (I didn't even go to the bathroom once). Based on David Grann's nonfiction book on the conspiracy to murder Osage Native Americans for their oil rights in 1920s Oklahoma, the film contains beautiful cinematic landscapes and matter-of-fact depiction of gruesome killings. Lily Gladstone is particularly impressive as Molly Burkhart, the Osage woman who is the central target of the plot. 

Robert DeNiro is the white businessman behind the murders and Leonardo DiCaprio is his nephew who marries Molly to get her oil rights, but who also loves her as he slowly poisons her. Jesse Plemmons has a quiet authority as the FBI agent who methodically unravels the series of slaughters. Cara Jade Myers delivers a strong supporting performance as Anna Brown, Molly's sister, a tough cookie who carries a gun in her purse. There are effective cameos by John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser. 

The film ends with a radio play reducing the horrific acts of death to a facile entertainment and as Robert DeNiro's character predicts, they are soon forgotten. 

The events were previously depicted in The FBI Story (1959) starring Jimmy Stewart. But in that propaganda piece for J. Edgar Hoover, the Osage murders were one episode in a sweeping saga of FBI triumphs. 

The 2024 Oscar race is now shaping up as a race between Oppenheimer and Killers, with Ridley Scott's Napoleon (set to open during Thanksgiving) coming up fast. Scorsese should have as many Oscars as John Ford (4), but he has only won one for The Departed. Scorsese is just as influential as Ford and has lost, usually to Hollywood favorite actor-directors Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, and Clint Eastwood. Will he add a much deserved second Golden Guy for this latest masterpiece? 

2023 Potential Oscar Nominated Films Seen So Far

Oppenheimer (34th Street AMC)

Barbie (Regal Union Square)

Asteroid City (Angelika)

Golda (County Theater, Doylestown, PA)

Killers of the Flower Moon (Regal Kaufman Astoria)

B'way Update: Lin-Manuel Miranda and NY, NY Musical

Liza Minnelli and Robert DeNiro in
New York, New York

Summertime and the livin' ain't easy. We keep getting bulletins about future shows. The latest is a new musical loosely based on the 1977 Martin Scorsese film New York, New York which starred Liza Minnelli and Robert DeNiro. Deadline reports the show which is aimed for Broadway in Spring 2023 will feature an all-star team behind the scenes. Dig this line up. The score will feature songs from the film by John Kander and Fred Ebb including the iconic title song immortalized by Minnelli and Frank Sinatra in separate recordings. New songs will be written by Kander with lyrics by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda. The book will be David Thompson who worked with Kander and Ebb on such projects as The Scottsboro Boys and Steel Pier, and Sharon Washington, who was in the cast of Scottsboro Boys and was seen most recently in the Central Park Richard III. Five-time Tony winner Susan Stroman (helmer of Scottsboro) will direct and choreograph. According to Deadline, the plot will bear little resemblance to that of the original film which followed the rocky relationship of bandleader DeNiro and his lead singer and love interest Minnelli. The new story will be set in 1946 in the title metropolis as it recovers after WWII.

This is probably the production Johnny Olensinski reported about in the New York Post when he wrote there was a Kander and Ebb revue called New York, New York possibly booked for the St. James in the spring.